Case Number 19138

RED DESERT: CRITERION COLLECTION

The Charge

You ask what you should watch. I ask how I should live. It's the same
thing.

Opening Statement

I've always wondered why European art directors shunned color filmmaking for
so long. With their love of art history in general and painting in particular,
it would have seemed natural for them to want to embrace the technology.
Instead, they turned their noses up at it for far longer than made sense. Red
Desert, the first color film by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'avventura)
and one of the earliest examples of color among the New Wave, shows exactly why
they should have switched. The film is a brilliant exercise in sight and sound,
using color theory and electronic music to alter mood without sacrificing plot
any more than his films already do. Now we can see the full beauty of the
director's work in this stunning new transfer from the Criterion Collection.

Facts of the Case

Giuliana (Monica Vitti, The Girl with a Pistol), a pensive young woman
living in the shadow of industry, has begun to crack from the alienation caused
by her surroundings. She tries to convince her husband, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti),
that she's in bad straits, but he thinks she's just hysterical. When she meets
Ugo's business associate, Corrado (Richard Harris, This Sporting Life)
she sees a chance to make somebody understand, but his intentions my not be so
innocent.

The Evidence

Our first impression of Giuliana is that she's possibly homeless, and
definitely strange. She comes out of the fog into an industrial complex, child
in tow, head down and looking afraid. She comes up to a stranger, maybe somebody
who works there, and asks for his hunk of bread, then skitters off to eat it in
private. This act of begging belies the fact that she's a well-to-do woman, the
wife of the factory owner, which sets us off kilter immediately. The questions
of who Giuliana is and why she reacts in these ways make up the body of Red
Desert, a beautifully composed film, one that uses color and sound to
augment the performances and shine light on both the glory of modern industrial
society and the alienation it inherently causes.

The three main characters show each of these aspects of industry. All we
know of Giuliana's background is that she is married to Ugo and has recently
been released from the hospital after a car accident, which may have been a
suicide attempt. By her actions, though, we can easily tell that she doesn't
belong to the industrial world; it scares her. The lack of connection she feels
to the world itself and the people who embrace it, including her husband, is a
trigger, if not a direct cause, for her diminishing sanity. Ugo has the opposite
relationship to industry. He adores it, sees it as an inevitable, joyous
progression to a better society. He loves it, in part, because of his profit
margins, but it's a more all-encompassing esthetic love, as well. These rusted
silos and steel-and-rivet structures are beautiful precisely because it marches
society into the future. Corrado falls somewhere in between the two. An
industrialist himself, he certainly understands Ugo's viewpoint. He believes in
the inevitability of it, but he can't take the same joy in it that his friend
does. Instead, he waxes on about his dream to throw it all away and return to a
simpler, more natural place. His conflict puts his being at odds with his
actions, turning him morose and needy.

The conflict Corrado feels between his love of industry and his desire to
escape helps to explain how he is drawn to both Ugo's and Giuliana's worlds. It
allows him to act like Ugo, but also to relate to Giuliana, understand her
fears, and draw her nearer to him. This is where the danger lies for her:
Corrado seems to be similar in spirit, but his capitalist nature causes him to
act in self-serving ways, and that understanding facade transforms into
seduction and Giuliana remains in the same troubled place.

Just as the story has an alienating quality, so to do the performances from
the leads. The film revolves around Giuliana, and Vitti is on screen nearly the
entire time. Her pensive demeanor is appropriately off-putting, all wringing
hands and facial tics. Her voice softly projects her myriad fears, but on the
occasion that she actually expresses herself, you can feel all that pent-up
emotion pouring out. Richard Harris is equally strong as Corrado. I've always
like Harris and he gets the chance here to fully utilize his large, physical
style. He is dubbed into Italian, of course, but his body does the talking more
than his voice. Chionetti, as Ugo, is the only off note. Red Desert is
the only credit for the actor that I can find, but in spite of his inexperience,
it's more the unapproachable nature of the character that makes him seem so
strange. All told, if these aren't the finest Antonioni has directed, it's still
a fine group of performances.

Antonioni shows his full filmmaking prowess in Red Desert, maybe more
than his earlier, more widely-viewed films because of the color palette on
display. According to the commentary on the disc, the director had spent
considerable time studying color theory, and it shows in the way he changes
lighting and focus depending on place and action. In the industrial park, the
tones are muted and dirty; he went so far as to paint the grass and mud to
achieve his exact vision. In certain interiors, on the other hand, the colors
are bold, lighting is bright, and the focus is sharp. Often, these scenes appear
to be more of something from the mind of Douglas Sirk than Antonioni himself.
This beautifully shot film has a painterly quality to it throughout, in which
sight lines and vanishing points are as important as direct action. An
impressive showing from Antonioni's cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma. Giovanni
Fusco's vocal and electronic score nicely accentuates the style and the story.
There are slight changes in the sound depending on the scenario, but it is often
a droning, disconcerting piece of music that fits in perfectly with the rest of
the film. Disconnected from traditional instruments, the score further alienates
the viewer from natural things.

Red Desert has been given the usual top shelf treatment by Criterion.
The image is nearly pristine throughout. There is beautiful depth in the
picture, with gorgeous, vibrant colors, and just a hint of the grain that shows
its age. Black levels are solid and contrast is perfectly balanced. There is one
odd defect, however, about two-thirds of the way through the film. The three
leads are walking in a line down the beach when a huge brown streak splits the
screen and lasts for two or three seconds. Given how the rest looks, it's quite
jarring, but it doesn't look like typical damage. I'm curious about why this, in
particular, was impossible to clean when the remainder looks so good. The sound
is as good as you can expect from mono, with clean dialog and a well-balanced
music track.

We're presented with a good slate of extras, as well, starting with an
excellent audio commentary with Italian film scholar David Forgacs. While it's a
sometimes dry discussion of the film, he is extremely informative and clued me
in to many of the reasons Red Desert is such a strong work that aren't so
apparent on an initial viewing. A fairly lengthy pair of interviews, the first
with Antonioni and the second with Monica Vitti, add more information about the
intentions and meaning behind the work. We also get two earlier short films from
the director. The first, Gente del Po chronicles a barge trip down the Po
River, and the second, called N.U. details the work lives of Italian
street cleaners. They're both interesting, but inessential. With a trailer and a
book of essays and additional interviews, this is quite a nice set.

Closing Statement

Red Desert is a beautiful piece of work that rewards multiple
viewings. It doesn't have the most interesting narrative in the world, but the
technical and artistic qualities of the film are second to none.